The ear-gym routine
The ear is built the way sight-reading is built — a little, every day, for a long time. This is the daily routine that ties Movements D through H together.
The ten-minute menu
At the start of a practice session, before your ear tires:
| Minutes | What |
|---|---|
| 2 | Sing & match. Drone on. Sing up and down the scale in numbers; match single pitches to the string until they lock. |
| 3 | Scale-degree gym. Your current wave (the-scale-degree-drills) — random degrees, then pairs, then short fragments. Name them. |
| 2 | Harmony. A few chords: major or minor? home, leaving, or pulling? (major-or-minor, home-leaving-pulling). |
| 2 | Dictation. One short rhythm and one short melody, taken down and checked (the-dictation-drills). |
| — | A new tune by ear every few days (learning-a-tune-by-ear) — not daily, but a standing project. |
Ten minutes. Every degree named, every chord judged, every phrase sung. That's the whole thing.
Two rules that matter more than the menu
- Distributed, not massed. Ten minutes daily beats seventy minutes on Sunday, by a wide
margin — the ear consolidates what it learned overnight. Same rule as scales
(
how-to-practise-a-scale) and sight-reading (the-sight-reading-habit). - Always sing. Every drill has a sing step. If you're only listening and naming, you're
doing half the exercise — the voice is how the ear checks itself
(
singing-is-not-optional).
The tools
- The drone in the practice bar — running under every drill.
- The drill pages —
the-scale-degree-drills,the-dictation-drills, and the harmony drills inside the Movement F lessons. - A metronome for the rhythm work.
- Recordings — for the "learn a tune by ear" project, any song you like. Later, an ear trainer app (Functional Ear Trainer, Teoria, Toned Ear) for extra reps between sessions.
Try it
Try
Do the full ten-minute menu tomorrow morning, first thing in your practice. Set a timer for each block so you don't overrun one and skip another. Do it every day for two weeks, then judge: which block is easy now, which is still hard? Spend an extra minute on the hard one.
The usual mistake
Long, occasional ear-training binges — an hour every week or two — which build almost nothing, because the gains come from frequency, not session length. The other mistake: dropping the singing to "save time." That's not a shorter workout; it's a different, weaker one.